Human Footprint's facts of life

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A new British documentary uses hundreds of pieces of food to give us a better idea of how much the average Brit eats and drinks in a lifetime.....

Human Footprint's facts of life



Bath of beans ... the average person consumes 845 cans (shown above in a bathtub). The British eat far more baked beans, though, than any other nation



By EMMA COX
Deputy TV Editor
APRIL 18, 2007

GULP – take a look at our photos that show just some of the food and drink we EACH manage to polish off in a lifetime.

The other amazing snaps picture the number of baths we will take and the friends we make.

Life’s supply of basics such as milk, bread, spuds and baked beans were gathered together for a TV show.

That’s 16,000 pints of milk, 4,283 loaves of bread, 2,327 potatoes and 845 tins of beans — enough to fill a bath.



Milk and spuds ... a lifetime's supply of
potatoes and dairy


We also tuck into four-and-a-half cows, 1,201 chickens, 10,354 bars of chocolate and 5,272 apples — washed down with 10,351 pints of beer and 1,694 bottles of wine.

The fascinating information was gathered for Channel 4’s The Human Footprint.

The programme also reveals what these mountains of foods fuel us up to do over the average UK lifetime of 78.5 years.

This includes having 104,390 dreams, taking 7,163 baths — represented by the rubber ducks — opening 628 Christmas presents, making 1,700 friends, buying £30,222 worth of new clothes and having sex 4,239 times.

We also take an average 59 trips abroad, read 2,455 newspapers and use 4,239 loo rolls, 276 tubes of toothpaste and 198 bottles of shampoo.

We blink 415 MILLION times and speak 123,205,750 words — an average of 4,200 a day.

And we blow off a whopping 35,815 litres of air and vomit 149 litres. To illustrate these astonishing stats the documentary makers gathered up our supplies for life in one place.

The ducks are on a lake holding around the total amount of water we’ll use in a lifetime of baths.



Bath time ... rubber ducks float on pond
filled with a lifetime's bathwater



None of the pictures were made with computer-generated images or special effects. They were painstakingly set up for real over several months at a farm in Dorset.

The programme is the brainchild of Nick Watts. He came up with the idea when he was having a pint and wondered how much beer he would drink in his lifetime and whether it would fill a swimming pool (it would).

He says: “I’m fascinated by statistics but I wanted to give them a physical form — then they become truly poignant.”

The statistics were gathered from sources including Defra, the National Office of Statistics, market researchers and charities.

Nick added: “We accepted a statistic only when we were entirely convinced it was the most reliable figure available and that we were satisfied by the method behind it.


Your mates ... the average person makes 1,700 friends


“The film has no agenda, it’s not just about our personal impact on the environment.

“It allows us time to reflect what being alive is really about.”

thesun.co.uk